One important aspect of the age of revolution was the Latin American wars of independence. During the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which raged, with one major interruption, from 1792 to 1815, Spain's New World colonies launched wars for independence. Mexico's struggle for independence began in 1810 and ended in 1821.

A decade of warfare against Spain killed a tenth of the Mexican population, mainly young men of fighting age. After independence, Mexico's gross domestic product was at less than half its peak at 1805 which it would not surpass until the 1870s. Per capita income declined and the volume of foreign trade dropped to less than that in the late colonial period.

To encourage economic development, Mexico abandoned Spain's mercantilist restrictions on foreign commerce. It permitted a rapid influx of foreign settlers, foreign merchandise, and foreign capital, and let Mexicans sell goods in foreign markets. Spain had excluded foreigners from its northern provinces, but these restrictions evaporated under Mexican rule. Mexico opened Texas to Anglo-American immigration. In New Mexico and southern California, many settlers from the United States married into the local aristocracy. In Texas and in California's Sacramento Valley, in contrast, settlers from the northern republic lived apart from the Mexican population. Mexico also opened its northern frontier to trade with the United States. Anglo-American trappers used New Mexico as a base. Anglo-American merchants settled in Santa Fe and Taos. California, too, attracted traders and trappers fro Mexico's neighbor. In the early 1820s, traders from there developed an intensive trade along the Santa Fe Trail. Meanwhile, California began to trade hide and tallow with Britain and the United States. At the same time that the borders of Mexico's northern frontier grew more porous, the system of defense that Spain had established weakened. The presidio system, manned by small units of light cavalry, decayed after 1821. Responsibility for defense rested on the northern frontier's inhabitants.

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